Wednesday, December 16, 2009

NPR's Marketplace radio show last night had a story about the booming inter-city bus services, and how new on-board amenities like wifi service is letting bus services steal market share from airlines and Amtrak. Here's the transcript, and an excerpt:

ANDREA BERNSTEIN: Brandon Prust is not the kind of guy you might expect to take the bus. He's wearing a nice suit and overcoat, and has a laptop slung over his shoulder. The international finance worker might have taken the train...

BRANDON PRUST: But there's no Wi-Fi. So if there were Wi-Fi, I'd probably take Amtrak but...

BERNSTEIN: Do you ever think the bus is kinda low class? It's you know...

PRUST: Not this one.

Here in Maine, though, the situation is reversed: the Downeaster passenger rail service offers wifi for its passengers, but Concord Coach hasn't... yet.

That will soon change, though: a number of new buses run by Concord Coach in Maine now sport their own free wifi connections. Still, for the time being, the new white buses are only a small part of the Portland-to-Boston fleet. There's no way to know whether the bus you'll be riding has wifi until it's time to go, so it's a bit of a crapshoot for passengers. Hopefully Concord Coach will roll out the technology to the rest of its buses quickly, so that its passengers can be as certain about getting wifi as they are about getting a mediocre movie.

According to the Downeaster's manager, Patricia Quinn, an on-board wifi connection costs about $230 per unit, plus $45 a month for the service. For a bus carrying hundreds of passengers a day, those costs are pretty minor, and they're likely to be offset by the addition of new (and happier) riders. Other bus services, like the ZOOM Turnpike Express, a commuter bus that travels between Biddeford and Portland, should also be adopting this technology as soon as they can.

Whether it's on a bus or a train, wifi on transit services is just one more reason that fewer and fewer people are willing to waste their time in the driver's seat of an automobile.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

The 'aughts are almost over. This was the decade of the real estate bubble, but it would be easy to assume that the bubble passed us by. After all, the city's skyline, as viewed from Falmouth or across the harbor in South Portland, hasn't changed much in the past 10 years.

But take a closer look, by walking along the city's main streets and through its neighborhoods, and it's clear that Portland is substantially newer and more vibrant than it was in 1999, when I graduated from Bonny Eagle High School and left for college in that other Portland. Many of the buildings are the same, but they've been refurbished and re-inhabited with households and businesses that care more about them. And elsewhere, abandoned lots and under-utilized parking spaces have given way to new housing and businesses.

The Portland peninsula has sprouted dozens of new buildings in the past decade. Here are five of my picks for the best, in no particular order (I'll post five more in a follow-up post next week):

While prosperity arrived in most of Portland's neighborhoods during the 2000s, East Bayside was largely left out. The neighborhood is centrally-located geographically, but it remains isolated thanks to the lousy ideas of 1960s urban renewal: a monopoly of government-owned housing and dead-end streets cut off by the wretched Franklin Arterial. It's Portland's most Detroit-like neighborhood.

Bayside East is a another affordable housing project, but unlike its older neighbors, it doesn't look like one. The south-facing patio works well as a pleasant public space for the building's residents, and the solar hot water heaters take a prominent place as a sort of awning on the top floor.

It's not at all flashy, but of all of Portland's new buildings, this one might be the most successful at integrating itself into the scale and context of Portland's central-city neighborhoods. It goes a long way towards healing East Bayside's tattered urban fabric.

There was a time when banks invested in good, quality buildings to establish a public trust in the solidity of their institutions.

During the 2000s, though, most banks were content to put up cheap offices ringed with drive-thrus. Banks literally sought to emulate fast-food joints, both in the facile idiocy of their products and in the shittiness of their architecture. And then they collapsed.

Bangor Savings Bank wasn't immune from this impulse - they built Burger Bank franchises out on Brighton Ave. and over the bridge in South Portland's Mill Creek Strip Mall - but at least they put some effort into their downtown Portland branch and corporate offices. It's a quality building, and the curved acute angle of its northern corner adds a dynamic presence to the corner of Franklin and Fore Streets. I don't mind admitting that my admiration for the building led me to choose this bank over its competition.

Like the W.L. Blake Building addition below, this is an attractive modernist structure that fits in well with its historic surroundings on Congress Street. It's even more striking in the context of what it replaced, a pair of half-abandoned 2-story hovels that stuck out like a missing incisor in Congress Street's smile.

The wide glass windows and striking metal siding probably make this building the city's most stereotypical example of 'aughts architecture. It's clearly making a hard sales pitch for "loft living" - you can even buy Eames chairs and contemporary art from the ground-floor retail tenants. Still, it's a damned attractive sales pitch, and even if it's a bit cliched I much prefer this to the urban abandonment that prevailed in the latter half of the last century.

W.L. Blake Building Addition, 79 Commercial St. By David Lloyd of Archetype Architects. Completed 2001.

This was one of the first new buildings of the 'aughts, and it set a good precedent. The new building respects its historic neighbors on either side by adopting the same scale and massing. But it stops short of imitating their brick cladding and granite sills and lintels (unlike most other new buildings in the city, regrettably) with fine-looking building materials of our own era.

The view from inside the offices must be incredible. But the view from the street ain't bad, either.

At the beginning of this decade, the city was in the midst of a severe housing shortage, thanks to decades of pointlessly-restrictive zoning and a resulting lack of investment.

Unity Village was one of the city's first proactive efforts to turn things around. City Hall offered up three city-owned parking lots behind city hall to developer Richard Berman (disclosure: I helped build his company's website) for a new, mixed-income housing complex. Today, it's a place where the newly-homeless can live comfortably and unassumingly next to white-collar downtown office workers and immigrant families. The homes have abundant porches that mesh the private life of the households with the vibrant public life of the narrow street and a nearby playground.

If Unity Village hadn't been as successful as it is, the City could easily have slid back into the old habit of Not-In-My-Backyard zoning, which would have effectively stymied most of the other projects listed here. Instead, it helped spark the broader revitalization of Bayside. Unity Village demonstrated to Portlanders that new development - even if it brought poor people into the neighborhood - could be an improving asset for the community.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

On behalf of the PACTS staff and Bruce Hyman Planning, thank all of you for your interest and enthusiastic participation in the update of our 1995 Bike/Pedestrian Plan. A lot of thought and hard work went into this plan and we think its excellent document.

It can now be accessed and commented on at our new blog site; PACTS Blog.

Portland Maine Bike Map

The first and only Portland Maine Bike Map highlights bike routes, lanes, and paths from Falmouth to Scarborough, Casco Bay to Westbrook - almost everyplace you can comfortably reach in an easy hour's ride from downtown Portland.